This week, chance wanted me to record my last broadcast of Nature according to Boucar on the theme of time in the old Radio-Canada tower. I was with my friend and guest Normand Brais, physicist and great science enthusiast. The concept of time may seem trivial at first sight, but it is of great philosophical complexity.
Posted yesterday at 12:00 p.m.
This same coincidence also wanted Janette Bertrand to also be present on this show. It was after the recording was finished that I realized how Janette and the Radio-Canada tower, in some ways, are quite comparable in terms of the role they played in the development of what is called the Quebec exception, this unique way of celebrating life.
It’s a cliché, but I repeat: Quebec is this Gallic village in North America which resisted assimilation for centuries and which developed a progressive social model that cannot be compared to that of any nation on the continent. Quebecers are pioneers in the struggles for gender equality, free choice, the sharing of wealth, the rights of sexual minorities and the disabled, the right to health for all , free education, so-called $5 daycare centers and many others.
If I mention this Quebec singularity, it is because I think that television and language have been important actors in the construction of this Quebec exception. Janette and the Radio-Canada tower have a lot to do with the development of these “here” particularities that have personally charmed me to the point of putting down roots “here”.
Isolated by this wall that was the fact of speaking French in Canada, Quebecers mainly consumed their own television and artistic productions while the Canadian Anglophones went to watch TV in our southern neighbours!
In the Radio-Canada tower, which is turning off its last lights, generations of men and women of influence have come to life, teaching, raising awareness and profoundly transforming society through flagship programs that have become major – national masses.
Television has always been a powerful agent of change at the heart of Quebec’s development. Obviously, I’m talking about the public broadcaster here, but Télé-Métropole, now TVA, and the other private channels have played major roles in the dynamics of Quebec society.
From the very beginning, Janette Bertrand has exerted a positive influence in the construction and social transformation of Quebec. As if invested with a mission, with each of its broadcasts, it broke down barriers, upset representations, put a finger on prejudices and forced society to look painfully at its failings in the mirror screen. She talked about homosexuality, sexually transmitted diseases, gender equality, divorce, free choice, any other subject that encourages reflection and the questioning of systemic discriminations and unconscious biases of society. . In doing so, she catalysed, by touching hearts, paradigm shifts that no law or advertising campaign could achieve with such efficiency and sincerity. She used art wisely.
Let’s say that during her long career, Janette Bertrand plowed, sowed and weeded our social garden by touching the heart, dilating the spleen and stimulating the spirit of people “from here”!
Like the Radio-Canada tower that is bowing out, Janette is an important player in our collective identity. This tower, of which she knows every corner, is therefore not a building like the others, one of those that you leave without looking back. It is a place steeped in history.
Sitting in studio 18, I could almost hear the voice of my friend Serge Bouchard in the walls. I also had a thought for this other giant, Joël Le Bigot, this two-legged encyclopedia that I would selfishly wish to live forever on the microphone, but who recently announced that he was leaving the airwaves at the same time as this tower, which remains impassive before the great history of which it is the custodian.
Like Le Bigot, Janette has never liked being told about what she has achieved, the milestones she has laid in the historic edifice of Quebec. But, if you want to hear his passion and his ardor expressed, ask him about his next book or about his project “Writing his life”. In this project launched during confinement, she accompanies and encourages seniors to tell their story to better resist loneliness.
To paraphrase my dad, who is nearly a century old, Janette is actively enjoying her “overtime game of her life.” The one whose body does not age at the same speed as her brain assumes her successes as her less good shots and speaks with a smile of the reaper she sees approaching. As an epitaph, she would simply like us to highlight the woman who loved her neighbour.
Before she left the studio, I read her this lovely note that my friend Normand Brais wrote for her. Normand, the most poetic of nuclear physicists, wrote: “The record for the longevity of matter would belong to the proton; this first basic constituent of all atoms is almost eternal. In Quebec, one would be tempted to say that given her longevity, Janette Bertrand is our national proton. But, because she’s been a beacon that’s been shining on us for so long, I’d say Janette is more of our national photon. And, like photons, it is as brilliant as it is timeless! »
Well, I left this lighthouse and the big tower telling myself that their voice and their light have guided more than one and more than one!